It’s that time of year again. Love it or hate it, Black Friday (the shopping day after Thanksgiving) is coming around the pike, and retailers are going overboard with special sales to try and lure you in. If you have been holding off getting a piece of electronics or other gift, waiting for deals after Thanksgiving, you are in luck, because major retailers such as Wal Mart, Best Buy and Target have announced some great deals.

In a controversial move, many leading retailers are opening earlier than the traditional 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. time on Friday morning. Many will be opening at midnight, and Wal Mart is going a step further and opening at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. This means that for all the die hards who wait in line to be among the first shoppers making a mad rush into the store to scramble for the very best low priced deals, they will have to now essentially stay up all night. Employees too are having to sacrifice family time, to show up for work in the middle of the night. So, instead of watching a football game with uncles they will have to take a nap to prepare for the all nighter.

Best Buy

Best Buy is offering a free Blu Ray player when you purchase a Sprint smart phone. Or how about this, a 55″ LCD tv for under a thousand bucks. Its top doorbuster sale is a 42-inch 1080p Sharp LCD TV for just $199.99. (Another doorbuster is a Toshiba Blu-ray player for a mere $39.99.) That beats the 40-inch Element LCD that Target is offering for $265.

Wal Mart/h2>

Walmart Kicks-off Three Black Friday Events starting at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Today on Thursday, November 10, 2011 the Walmart Black Friday flier was released on Facebook and Walmart.com. It is supposed to help families with their Christmas shopping and to save them money. There are three special-shopping events. The first one is for toys, home, and apparel starting at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day(November 24th). The second event starts at midnight on Black Friday(November 25th). This second event is for electronics. The third event starts at 8 a.m. on November 25th through the weekend. It is for presents for the entire family and electronics. These events are good while supplies last. You can get the hot new Xbox release Batman, Arkham City for under $30, a 50% discount.

Target

Target seems to have Best Buy and Walmart beat n base models of video game consoles. It’s offering a 4GB Xbox 360 for a mere $139.99 and a 160GB PlayStation 3 for $199. only one other Black Friday TV deal: the 32-inch Samsung LN32D403 for $277.99, which is about $50 less than what Amazon is selling it for now.

Amazon

Amazon knows when you are looking for its Black Friday deals, because when you Google it and hit an Amazon page, it actually lists early Black Friday deals tailor made for you, based on your previous browsing history. Of course, Amazon offers some nice deals in Electronics, such as 30% savings on a Leap Pad Leapster. Or $3.99 for the latest Harry Potter DVD. You can also sign up for the daily deal of the day delivered to you via email.

Payday loans are a bad idea that unfortunately is a huge business in America. When people live paycheck to paycheck, and run out of cash before their next pay period, they are often tempted to get a payday loan. These are short-term, high-interest loan sas an advance against your next paycheck. Perhaps your car breaks down, and now you have have an unexpected expense. With no credit, and no friends or family to loan them the money, a payday loan seems like a a good option.

The problem is that people seldom borrow the money for one month and pay it all back the next month. Typically, they roll over the loan, and try to keep up with the high interest rate. What happens is a harsh cycle of constant payment of interest owed, and taking out a new loan to get you through to the next pay period. After a year of this, you wind up having paid far more in interest than your original first payday loan.

Because payday loan places are considered predatory lenders, taking advantage of low income people, many states have banned them outright or severely restricted what they can do. Thus, many payday loan companies with physical locations have closed up shop and went online instead. They have also gotten around new laws, by rebranding themselves and “micro loan” companies along the lines of quite legitimate nonprofits such as Kiva.org. They also try to get through a loophole in the law to say that their loan is an “auto loan” when in reality, they aren’t selling you a car directly, and aren’t requiring proof that you are actually using the loan to by a car.

Now, apparently, the FTC is going after the worst offenders. A recent post on the FTC’s web page describes a District Court case brought by the FTC against Payday Financial, LLC, doing business as Lakota Cash and Big Sky Cash, who allegedly send documents to their borrowers’ employers that mimic a garnishment by the Federal government. The FTC alleges that these lenders illegally revealed consumers’ unproven debts to their employers and deprived consumers of their right to dispute the debts or make payment arrangements. The complaint further alleges that lender “…misrepresented to employers that the defendants are legally authorized to garnish an employee’s wages, without first obtaining a court order.”

While not as bad as payday lenders, banks are also getting in on sucking in high profits on the backs of people who are tempted to get quick cash for short term needs at high interest. One typical method is to offer a payday loan if you keep a minimum deposit of say $200 with the bank. Of course, if you don’t pay it back right away, the interest compounds so that the annual interest is quite high. Similarly, credit card holders are no doubt used to getting something that looks like blank checks from their credit card company. The credit card company encourages you to “use the checks” like cash, hoping that you do not read the fine print about the interest rate being the “cash advance” rate, which is usually much higher than the interest rate for purchases. For example, your purchases interest rate might be 12% but your cash advance rate 24%!

So, the bottom line is if you feel you need quick cash, start budgeting like a mad man. If your car breaks down, take the bus for a while until you can save enough for another car.

Preparing meals at home has always been more cost effective than eating out. And in this economy, eating in a sit down restaurant may seem like a splurge. That’s why it’s important to feel like you are getting your money’s worth when you do eat out. Here are some ways to save money on your next restaurant meal.

#1 Avoid the specials

Have you noticed that when wait staff tell you the day’s specials they fail to mention their price. That’s because specials are usually priced higher than the menu items. Often, they are 50% higher. The wait staff is encouraged to “push the specials.” They are meant to entice you with special ingredients–”reduction of this” and “compote of that.” The wait staff is counting on the natural response of not wanting to sound like a cheapskate by asking about the price.

#2 Ask for extra bread

Most restaurants try to fill you up with baskets of bread before your first course arrives. Don’t be shy about asking the wait staff to bring you more bread so you can eat copious quantities of it while eating your soup or salad or main entree. Sometime restaurants can be stingy about the complimentary bread.

#3 Go easy on the appetizers

Some waiters trick you into ordering too many appetizers by prompting you to order more than one appetizer. You might order one appetizer, and they raise their eyebrow and ask, “Is that all?” Or they say that another appetizer is also good, implying that each person at the table should eat their own appetizer. Some restaurants also offer appetizer samplers which combine two or more appetizers on the menu, but these samplers inevitably are priced higher, sometimes three times higher than any one appetizer. Unless you are making a meal of just appetizers, save room for the main course.

#4 Or make it a meal of appetizers

It’s perfectly acceptable to just order from the soup, salad, and appetizer sections of a menu and not get a main entree. Don’t let the wait staff make you feel bad. It’s your meal, not theirs. Spanish tapas restaurants, which give you a bunch of small appetizer plates by design, are paving the way for this trend.

#5 Split plates with a friend

Again, don’t be shy about asking to split a salad before the main course, or to split a main course. Just tell the waiter with a straight face, “we’re grazing.”

#6 Skip dessert

Do you really need that $7 piece of pie or scoop of ice cream on a brownie? Hold off on desert until you get home, where if you want to splurge, split a pint of Ben and Jerry’s with your date.

#7 Drink water

Drinks are pure profit for restaurants. Often, you can be perfectly content having a fine meal, and washing everything down with ice water, instead of iced tea. Ordering a bottle of wine or beer can increase your restaurant tab by 30%-40%, so don’t do it unless you want to. Waiters hate it when everyone around a table orders water instead of iced tea, cokes, or beer, because they just see a lower bill and a smaller tip.

#8 Order the cheapest bottle of wine

OK, let’s say you see five bottles of white wine starting at $18 and ending up at $60. Somewhere in the mix is a $27 bottle of wine which is the most popular seller, because the restaurant knows that you won’t splurge on the $60 bottle unless you are trying to impress someone, and you won’t order the $18 for not wanting to look cheap. Don’t worry about it. Get the $18, because it’s really a $9 if you were to get it at the grocery store.

#9 Eat at a restaurant that lets you bring your own bottle of wine

Often, new ethnic restaurants that don’t have a liquor license, like that cute Vietnamese place off the main drag, encourage you to bring your own bottle of wine. Find those places and frequent those places.

#10 Wash dishes

As crazy as this sounds, sometimes you can set up a deal ahead of time with a restaurant owner to trade a meal for a service. If you literally don’t want to wash dishes, and you have a skill like marketing, you might offer to design a flyer for the restaurant or set up a Facebook page in exchange for a meal.

#11 Complain about anything that was wrong with the meal.

Meal too salty? Let the waiter know and odds are the chef will want to make you happy so you will come back. Sometimes you can get a complimentary dessert out of it.

#12 Ask for a take out box for any leftovers

If you can’t finish your meal, sometimes you can eat the leftovers for lunch, saving money by not buying that lunch.

So there are 12 money saving tips to consider the next time you eat out. Know that MiCash MaserCard is accepted at any restaurant that accepts MasterCard debit cards. Just look for the MasterCard logo.

If you really want to save money, try to recreate your favorite restaurant meal at home.

Do you have too many credit cards including department store cards? If you want to cut up a credit card, make sure you understand how to cancel a credit card without hurting your credit score. Just follow these steps.

Step 1: Pay off the card in full. This means you bring your balance down to zero.

Step 2: Check to make sure the balance is zero by calling Customer Service or checking your account a balance online. Call Customer Service to make sure the balance is really zero. Interest may have still been accumulating.

Step 3: Cancel the account over the phone—not by email or online—once you confirm that the balance is zero. At this point, the credit card company may try to entice you to stay by offering you some special deals like a lower interest rate. Funny how they don’t offer these deals to you even if you ask for them, until you announce that you want to close your account

Step 4: Confirm that the account is closed by writing the company and asking for written confirmation that the account is closed. Be sure to keep a copy of whatever communication the card company sends you. File it away, because you never know when you might need it.

Step 5: Check your credit report after a few weeks to be sure that the account is really closed. It can take a while which is why you should wait a few weeks. You can check your credit report for free, by law, once a year. Be wary of companies that want to overcharge you to get your credit report from one of the three credit reporting agencies. Experian, Equifax, and Trans Untion. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months. The FCRA promotes the accuracy and privacy of information in the files of the nation’s consumer reporting companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, enforces the FCRA with respect to consumer reporting companies.

It’s a pervasive myth that closing a credit card account will automatically lower your credit score (also known as a FICO score). This is not necessarily true. It’s only true if your credit utilization ration is affected. This ratio is calculated by taking your total used credit and comparing it to your total available credit; the higher this ratio is, the more it can negatively affect your FICO score. Essentially, by closing an old or unused card, you are eliminating some of your available credit thus increasing your credit utilization ratio.

“To close card accounts and not affect your credit score, you need to only have zero balances on your credit report for all of your active credit cards. If you have zero balances your credit utilization rate is zero, and you can’t raise it — and potentially hurt your score — by closing one or more of the active card accounts.

But you may be asking yourself: if I can bring the card to $0 balance what would I really gain from closing it? It’s not like the credit card company will charge interest on a $0 balance card. Also, one barrier to keeping a card active without a balance is the annual fee. So, if you want to avoid an annual fee, then go ahead and close it. Finally, in closing, let me say that having 1-20% of credit utilization ratio is the best. So simply make sure that after closing the card you don’t want, your credit utilization ratio is still between 1-20% should do the trick.

Outlet malls continue to be built while traditional malls and even big box store developments are floundering in a tough economy. That’s no surprise, since people are careful with their spending these days and are always on the lookout for deals.

“Mall giant Simon Property Group last summer scored the biggest real estate deal of the year when it announced it was buying Prime Outlets’ 21 properties for a whopping $2.5 billion,” writes the Washington Examiner. Other discount mall developers are also buying up land out in the countryside, typically right off an interstate.

But are outlet malls worth the drive?

It depends. One complaint about these malls is that they are located far from major metropolitan areas. Typically an outlet mail might be 30 or 50 miles drive from a major city. Thus, if you live in one of those cities, you may find it inconvenient to drive an hour (or two!) to get to the mall. Factor in the price of gasoline, and you are already in the hole before you even begin shopping. On the other hand, just as many people live far from the city and have a long commute to get to the city to work. So the reality might be that the outlet mall isn’t that far of a drive. Also, parking is typically free, contrasted with the costs of metered parking or parking garages in cities.

Also, at an outlet mall you can visit many different kinds of stores in one place, versus possibly driving around town, or to different towns to try and duplicate the shopping excursion. That’s more costs in gas and time.

Quality or Not?

Depending on the retailer, the quality of merchandise may not be as good as what you would find in the retailer’s regular stores. Retailers often delegate overstock, discontinued items, and otherwise cast off items to their outlets. Imagine a rack of clothes that nobody wanted in the regular stores. Or imagine a rack full of seconds, XXL, SM, but nothing in your size. Also, some retailers make items that are only for the outlets, sometimes of lesser quality (thinner material for instance). If the label is marked F, that may mean “factory” not for regular retail consumption.

On the other hand, many retailers sell the very same items that you would find in regular retail environments for a major discount. This is because they are cutting out the middle man and selling direct to the public. Retailers aren’t happy about direct competition with the factory, but given Internet sales these days, it’s a fact of life that they have come to accept.

Question Steep Discounts off Retail

Sometimes a 60% off is a great deal, and sometimes it means that the original price was inflated, and not something you would have ever paid. It’s inflated, to make the discount look better. The Federal Trade Commission has published guidelines to prevent these kinds of shenanigans, but buyer beware.

Of course, clothing retailers often do provide great discounts for clothing that they have to liquidate, do to changes in fashion trends or seasons. So, for instance at Banana Republic you can find a shirt that was originally priced at $55 selling for $8 in July because it’s thick and long sleeved and has buttons that are no longer quite hip.

Nice Shopping Experience

One nice thing about discount malls is that many are outdoor malls. This is great in the summer time and less so in January in northern climates. A good outlet mall will include a food court so you can walk around with a drink in your hand. It may also include a mix of retailers, such as a book store, a furniture store, a kitchen wares store, a toy store, and of course clothes and shoes retailers.

So, if you haven’t been to an outlet mall in a while, check it out and let us know what you think.

Have you every had a friend or family member try to get you to sign up to their buying network with the promise that if you become a reseller of their network’s products, and sign up people under you, you will get rich quick? Well you know what they say about get rich quick schemes…if it’s too good to be true, run the other way. Multi-level marketing is just a pyramid scheme by another name.

Sometimes the products are vitamins. Or beauty supplies. Or cosmetics. Or sometimes they are all manner of stuff that you simply buy through the network. The way you can tell that what you are looking at is the multi-level marketing trap is when they only way you can make money is to get people to be “distributors” or “sales persons” under you, so that you take a commission from their sales, and then a commission from the people under them. The get rich part is when you have dozens of people under you, and they have dozens under them, and presumably you rise up a “level” in the pyramid of profits. Only, the thing is, any profits are elusive, because they are tied to getting all those people to join your distribution network.

I highly recommend this article by Robert FitzPatrick, who uncovers the lies of multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes in a book entitled: False Profits: eeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes. As FitzPatrick points out, multi-level marketing schemes are ultimately doomed for failure, because they seldom sell much product to the wider consumer marketplace, but rather sell products to the newest distributors to join the network, who in turn foist their products onto their unsuspecting friends and family members.

Have you been asked to attend a home party to hear the pitch? Or have you watched a DVD video from the wealthy head of the pyramid scheme explaining how easy it all is? Don’t believe it. Tell your friend or family member no thanks. Rest assured in a few months they will have given up, and hopefully haven’t lost too much money.

Says FitzPatrick, “The commercialization of family and friendship relations or the use of ‘warm leads’ which is required in the MLM marketing program is a destructive element in the community and very unhealthy for individuals involved. Capitalizing upon family ties and loyalties of friendships in order to build a business can destroy ones social foundation. It places stress on relationships that may never return to their original bases of love, loyalty and support. Beyond its destructive social aspects, experience shows that few people enjoy or appreciate being solicited by friends and relatives to buy products.”

How to Spot a Multt-Level Marketing Scheme

1. You have to buy the products through the multi-level marketing network.
2. You are told to sell to friends and family member through “personal retailing.”
3. Your profits depend on building a pyramid of distributors under your own account.
4. You have to buy a minimum amount of product every month regardless of whether you succeed in selling it or not.
5. The benefits of the company may be couched in spiritual terms.
6. The brand being sold is something you can’t find in stores (or if found in stores, it is being sold at a higher price through the network.

Heard of Amway? Again, here’s what FitzPatrick has to say:

In the largest of all MLMs, Amway, only 1/2 of one percent of all distributors make it to the basic level of “direct” distributor, and the average income of all Amway distributors is about $40 a month. That is gross income before taxes and expenses. When costs are factored, it is obvious that nearly all suffer a loss. Making it to “direct”, however, is not a ticket to profitability, but to greater losses. When the Wisconsin Attorney General filed charges against Amway, tax returns from all distributors in the state revealed an average net loss of $918 for that state’s “direct” distributors.

Extraordinary sales and marketing obstacles account for much of this failure, but even if the business were more feasible, sheer mathematics would severely limit the opportunity. The MLM type of business structure can support only a small number of financial winners. If a 1,000-person downline is needed to earn a sustainable income, those 1,000 will need one million more to duplicate the success. How many people can realistically be enrolled? Much of what appears as growth is in fact only the continuous churning of new enrollees. The money for the rare winners comes from the constant enrollment of armies of losers.

The vast majority of the losers in MLM drop out within a year. In a 1999 court case brought against Melaleuca, one of the country’s largest MLMs, the company claimed it has the highest “retention” rate among distributors in the entire MLM industry. Melaleuca boasted a drop-out rate is 5.5% per month. This equates to about 60% per year, if the dropouts are replaced each month.

In its annual report to the SEC, Pre-Paid Legal, another large MLM, revealed that more than 1/2 of all its customers and distributors quit each year and are replaced by another group of hopeful investors.

This pattern of 50-70% of all distributors quitting within one year holds true also for NuSkin, the industry’s second largest MLM. NuSkin also exemplifies the accompanying pattern in which a tiny percent of the distributors gain the majority of all company rebates. In 1998, NuSkin paid out 2/3rds of its entire rebates to just 200 upliners out of more than 63,000 “active” distributors. The money they received came directly from the unprofitably investments of the 99.7% of the others.

So do yourself a favor, don’t burn bridges with your friends and family by joining one of the MLM outfits and strong arming them into attending your product selling party and signing up to be your sub-distributor.

For seniors–sometimes called the elderly though who wants to be called that?–finances can be a struggle. If you are living on a fixed income, it’s too easy to run up debt on a credit card by over spending. Many seniors can’t even get a credit card, because they no longer have an attractive income to the credit card companies. Also, credit card companies rightly worry about the cardholder passing away with a large credit balance.

Prepaid Cards for Seniors

Retired folks do have an option. Prepaid MasterCards or Prepaid Visa cards give them the flexibility of paying for things with plastic. With a prepaid card, they can gas up their car if they are still driving, or shop online, or go out to eat at a restaurant, and not have to pay cash. Best of all, they can’t go into debt, because a prepaid card is not a credit card. As this website explains, you transfer your own money into your prepaid card account, and then when you use your card for purchases or to make cash withdrawals at an ATM machine, you are drawing down your own funds. You can reload your card with more cash at any time.

It’s no fun getting old, especially when you lose your financial independence. Prepaid cards can give you back that independence. You don’t have to carry a lot of cash and risk getting mugged for it, or hit up by family members. A study in Australia among Aborigines showed that when older people like grandmother’s cashed their public assistance checks, their own family members hit them up for cash, quickly draining their funds. But after those same payments were delivered on a prepaid card, the elderly was more likely to resist pressures, because they couldn’t just hand over their cash.

Social Security Payments Directly Deposited to a Prepaid Card

You can get your social security payment deposited directly to your prepaid card account, especially if you have a MiCash card. By setting up direct deposit, you’ll avoid any fees associated with alternative reload methods, such as the $4 charge per use of the Greendot MoneyPak.

Recently Sony revealed that upwards of 100 million people had their personal and financial information compromised by a security breach on the Sony Playstation online network. Analysts believe that hackers modified a Sony Playstation game console to find a way past security measures that failed to protect Sony’s massive user database. Sony confirmed that the following information was compromised: user name, address, country, e-mail address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID.

Sony admitted furthermore that users’ purchase history and billing address as well as PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have also been compromised.

Sony has proven slow to find a fix or assure the public that it won’t happen again. Its network remained down for over a week, and its Playstation business has surely taken a huge hit.

This incident is just the latest and highest profile case of compromised financial information. Until airtight security is assured on the Internet, it is likely that at some point your financial data might also fall into hackers hands.

Security of Prepaid Cards vs. Credit Cards

Both prepaid cards and credit cards are at risk of being stolen by hackers. Both use a unique account number, expiration date, and CVV security code on the back of each card. Both verify the user according to name and account mailing address.

One big advantage of reloadable prepaid cards is that attempted purchases or withdrawals for amounts greater than the balance of funds on the card will simply result in the card being declined, since by nature prepaid cards can’t get overdrawn (note, banks have made a push to get traditional debit card users to opt into overdraft protection.) However traditional debit cards, such as those that draw funds out of a checking or savings account, do expose you to having your account depleted. Check with your bank’s policy on fraud.

What to do to protect yourself:

If you suspect that your personal or financial information has been compromised on a website here are some suggested courses of action:

1. Change all your passwords: Many people use the same password on multiple websites. You should change your password on any site that includes financial information, such as banks and online retailers. This will prevent thieves from withdrawing funds, making orders using your card, or worse, stealing your identity. Changing your password on many different sites can be tedious, but it has to be done. Another thing to change is any common security questions that you may have used across multiple sites, such as your mother’s maiden name or your first car or pet.Here is a tip for creating a uniquely password for different site. Pick a phrase such as “I like red apples” and take the first letter of each word to make an easily remembered password (ILRA) now add a number using a memory trick to extend the phrase such as 4 for and finish off the phrase with the first letter or letters of the website. For example Amazon might be A.  Thus your amazon password would be ILRA4A. Your password for Borders Books would be ILRA4BB, and so on.
2. Beware of Phishing in your in-box: Whoever hacked Sony’s network now has a ton of personal information on Playstation users that can be used for targeted phishing scams. Phishing is when a hacker pretends to be a trusted source by sending you an email that looks like it is from a the trusted source. This can easily be done by formatting an email using a retailer or bank’s logo and branding. You should always be wary of any e-mails that ask for password or account information, but be extra vigilant because hackers will be better able to tailor their e-mails to individual users. There are often clues that something is not right, like the email address doesn’t match the name of the company it purports to be from. Never respond to such emails or click on the suspicious links. Instead, go directly to a company’s site to change your password.Since the Sony breach leaked physical addresses, users should be wary of snail mail scams, too.
3. Watch your finances: Sony users should assume their credit card or debit card information — minus security codes which were not leaked— have been leaked, as Sony says “out of an abundance of caution.” IN other words, log in frequently to your bank accounts closely and let your bank know about any unauthorized charges right away.